“Why is it when a woman is assaulted she doesn’t tell anyone until years later?” This question has been posed in the press and in social media lately, but the answer could be simple. Maybe the assaulted woman wanted to keep her job; maybe she wanted to keep her housing or protect her children. Maybe as a child she had been abused by her uncle, her older brother, or her neighbor, and when she told adults they shamed her into silence. Maybe she learned two things at an early age: 1) Men who abuse women get away with it, and 2) Women who want to get ahead learn to just put up with this shit and move on. This bleak picture was true for women of my generation, but there is a younger generation of women who will not tolerate it. These are the women who are really behind the #MeToo movement.
I was born in 1960, and I grew up with a sense that sexual harassment and assault is inevitable. It happens; move on. By the time I got to college in 1978, Feminism was in full swing, but sexual assault was high on campus. Starting in the Fall of 1979 sexual assault at University of Wisconsin—Madison had become so rampant that the school “strongly advised” women not to search for books at Memorial Library without a buddy. Then came warnings that female students living on campus not even walk home from the library without a buddy. Annoying, but we put up with it.
The other odd feature of 1979 college life was the Women Transit Authority or WTA. Sexual assault was high enough, and Feminism was organized enough, that we had a peer-based ride-sharing program. It came in handy when the University started telling us we couldn’t walk on campus after dark.
WTA was pretty sweet, and I used their services a lot. But no one asked, “What the hell is going on here—what happened to an equal-opportunity education? What is wrong with you people?” No one asked because we all assumed sexual assault was inevitable—1979 was just an aberration because there was more sexual assault than usual.
I dropped out of college in May of 1980 when I got a good job. The job included on-site housing, and by August that housing included “nightly visitors” of the sexual assault variety. The first night this happened we called the authorities, and they tried to talk us out of filing a complaint. One officer said, “It’s late; don’t you ladies have to work early tomorrow?” After the third episode of “nightly visitors” most of the female residents up and quit their jobs. (I like to buck the trend, so I simply moved into my office.)
One thing I can say about the job I had in 1980: of all the women I met there, not a single one survived the six-month project without being assaulted.
There is a reason why women of my generation have an unspoken sense that sexual harassment and assault is inevitable. If you know a woman my age (55-60) who has never mentioned any incident, don’t assume it hasn’t happened. Women learn to avoid or minimize the monsters; we learn to move, change jobs, take a different bus route--do whatever we have to do. But until now, we had not learned how to say: “This shit’s not normal.”
We have our younger sisters to thank for the starting the #MeToo movement. This a new generation of Feminists who were not raised with the idea that sexual assault is something we have just have to tolerate. No more changing apartments or jobs. No more just staying silent. It’s about goddamn time.
